Semantic expansion of onde

where is it going to?

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze functions and values ​​assumed by onde in their "deviant" uses in Portuguese of Brazil - PB, from examples extracted from documents and articles before being published in academic journals of a higher education institution of Minas Gerais / Brazil. As methodological procedure it was adopted the interpretive qualitative analysis of a corpus made up of 68 events. The hypothesis that guided the study is that onde can be going through a grammaticalization process, in which there are “abstratization” of its original sense of 'place where'. In its emerging uses, it is observed that onde occurs both without the pronoun functional value relative to physical space, as referring to not locative categories, or without anaphoric reference, as argumentative operator. It is suggested, therefore, that in this process there are two aspects of semantics acting simultaneously: the semantic modification properly with the expansion values, and the incorporation of typical properties of argumentative operator. The study is theoretical supported by studies on Grammaticalization of Hopper and Traugott (1993); of Cognitive Semantics (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and Ducrot (1989). The new values ​​of onde constitute its polysemy. The speaker conceptualizes these occurrences of onde as if they were inside something in a virtual space. The study concludes that the semantic change of onde seems to go in the sense to make it more than a relative “wildcard”, a discursive marker.